Escaping the Corporate Shackles

This chapter reviews the life stories of individual men that complement their lived experiences with how they reflected and talked about the way they lived. It offers silhouettes that reflect the comprehensive structures and dynamics of individuals, institutions, and ideologies operating in contemporary Japan. It also narrates stories of succeeding through, struggling with, or reacting against the social and economic expectations incumbent with the discourse of salarymen in Japan. The chapter examines the concept of the salaryman as a dominant category under the dominant ideology of companyism, which is discursively decipherable due to its perceived distinction of Japanese nonsalarymen. It presents the glaring disjuncture of nonsalarymen who grasp the key characteristics and organizing idioms of those who are classified as salarymen.